“Vercingetorix throws down his arms at the feet of Julius Caesar” by Lionel Royer, 1899
© AF Archive/Alamy
Passé présomptif
PETER THONEMANN
The first date in English History, according to 1066 and All That, is 55
BC, the year of Julius Caesar’s memorable landing at Thanet. “The
Ancient Britons”, Sellar and Yeatman remind us, “were by no means
savages before the Conquest, and had already made great strides in
civilisation, e.g. they buried each other in long round wheelbarrows
(agriculture) and burnt each other alive (religion) under the guidance of
even older Britons called Druids or Eisteddfods . . . . The Roman
Conquest was, however, a Good Thing, since the Britons were only
natives at that time.”
Except for a small minority of mistletoe-wielding henge-huggers, pre-
conquest Britain has never really impinged much on the British national
imagination. In schools, Our Island Story starts with Roman Britain,
which is still basically seen as a Good Thing. There are no public statues
of Caratacus, leader of the native British resistance to the Roman
invasion under Claudius in AD 43; even Boudicca, who led a later revolt
of the Iceni against Rome (AD 60), has never really taken off as a
national folk hero on the scale of King Arthur, Elizabeth I, or Winston
Churchill. (Just try to think of a famous saying by Boudicca.)
In France, things are different. Ever since the Revolution, the idea of a
deep and mystical connection with “our ancestors the Gauls” has been
central to French national identity. It is telling that Asterix, the plucky
Gallic resistance fighter against the Roman occupier, has no British
equivalent. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century British imperialists could
cheerfully identify with Rome’s civilizing mission in barbarian lands; the
French, faced with the problem of incorporating three traumatic foreign
occupations into their national self-perception (1870, 1914, 1940), have
tended to identify with the native Gaulish Résistance against Rome.
The first date in French history, accordingly, is 52 BC, the year of the
great “national” revolt of the Gauls against Rome. Southern Gaul
(modern Provence and Languedoc) had been a Roman province since the
late second century BC; through a series of brutal campaigns in the early
50s BC, Julius Caesar had brought most of the rest of Gaul into the
Roman orbit. Early in 52 BC, Vercingetorix, the chieftain of a powerful
Celtic tribe in the Auvergne (the Arverni), assembled a vast alliance of
Gallic peoples to drive the Romans out of central Gaul. Caesar crushed
the rebellion with extraordinary savagery: his siege of Avaricum (near
Bourges) ended with the slaughter of all but 800 of the town’s 40,000
inhabitants. Vercingetorix himself surrendered to Caesar after the fall of
Alesia (Mont-Auxois, near Alise-Sainte-Reine) in September 52 BC, and
was later executed in Rome.
Vercingetorix’s doomed revolt against Rome has made him a particularly
potent French culture hero, co-opted and invoked by everyone from
Marshal Pétain (“self-sacrifice for the greater glory of France”) to
Charles de Gaulle (“the first résistant of our race”), and from Napoleon
III (who erected a huge statue of Vercingetorix at Alesia, with the face
modelled on his own) to Jean-Marie Le Pen (“Gaul for the Gauls”). It is
no surprise that Vercingetorix is the first pre-modern “Frenchman” to be
admitted to Gallimard’s prestigious NRF Biographies series.
This handsome series of volumes (forty-nine so far) is a kind of literary
Panthéon of French national luminaries: Vercingetorix’s immediate
predecessors in the series were Montaigne, Louis Aragon, François
Mitterrand and Bonaparte. The occasional foreigner has crept in (Mao,
Fellini, Nabokov), as have a tiny handful of women (three out of forty-
nine), but on the whole, the NRF Biographical Club is very serious, very
male, and very French indeed.
Jean-Louis Brunaux has written a string of popular books on the history
and culture of pre-Roman Gaul, and his Vercingétorix is a work of
passion and grandeur: it will sell by the thousands. The trouble is that
Vercingetorix is about the most unsuitable subject for a biography one
could possibly imagine. Our evidence for his life consists, in its entirety,
of the following: (1) Caesar’s Gallic Wars Book VII, covering military
events of the year 52 BC from the Roman perspective, with a couple of
patently fictitious “speeches by Vercingetorix”; (2) a few pages of
Cassius Dio’s Roman History, written some 250 years later, which
recapitulate Caesar’s account with some additional tabloid flourishes; (3)
gold coins bearing the name VERCINGETORIXS, apparently struck
during the revolt. Of Vercingetorix’s life before 52 BC we know literally
not a thing.
Don’t despair! Are you aiming to write a “serious” 300-page biography
of someone about whom we basically know nothing Wat Tyler,
Nefertiti, or Pontius Pilate? Easy: it is all just a matter of careful
manipulation of narrative past tenses. When you have genuine evidence
for something, you can use the passé simple (and a footnote): “After his
defeat at Alesia, Vercingetorix threw his arms down at Caesar’s feet
(Caesar, Gallic Wars VII 89.4)”. When the evidence gives out, but there
is space for legitimate speculation and analogy, you can use the passé
spéculatif: “Caesar may well have required Vercingetorix to pass beneath
a yoke of spears, the standard Roman military ritual for humiliating
defeated enemies”.
But your secret weapon is what we might call the passé présomptif, a
special linguistic tool only used by struggling historical biographers. We
have not a scrap of evidence for Vercingetorix’s childhood, or indeed
any aspect of his life before the revolt of 52 BC; but presumably he came
from a chieftain’s family, presumably among the Arverni,
who presumably lived as other elite members of the Arverni did in the
first century BC and suddenly your book starts writing itself:
The family of Vercingetorix would have owned [possédait] several landholdings,
and at least one large villa in fact a huge agricultural manor at the heart of his
estates . . . the young Vercingetorix would have come to know [connaissait] the
skill, even the genius of the artisans working on his family estate: the blacksmiths
who could forge the most fearsome swords and wheel- and barrel-bands; the
potters who, in the plain of Limagne, produced the most beautiful and fascinating
ceramics, painted with strange and fabulous animals; the weavers who created
coloured fabrics with geometric designs, sometimes embroidered with gold and
silver filigree. And so it was that through the first twelve years of his life, this
young boy gained experience of a lifestyle, as the Gauls conceived it, intimately
linked to nature, and of the people with whom a Gallic chieftain had to deal.
Statements framed in the passé présomptif have several useful
characteristics. First, they are not subject to refutation. (Try showing that
Vercingetorix wasn’t familiar with late La Tène ceramic ware with
painted zoomorphic decoration, or that he wasn’t reared to a “lifestyle
intimately linked to nature”.) Second, once you have the knack,
statements in the passé présomptif can be strung together into 156 pages
of vivid and colourful biography (Brunaux’s first seven chapters,
covering Vercingetorix’s life before 52 BC) without breaking sweat. Pick
literally any event or object known from first-century BC Gaul; voilà,
you have something that Vercingetorix “would have eaten”, “must have
seen”, “could have known about”. Third, and most insidious, it allows a
biographer to take the moral high ground. Earlier historians, with their
tedious insistence on sticking to the evidence-based passé simple, have
based their picture of Vercingetorix on the one-sided account of his
enemy Caesar; I have got beyond this chauvinistic Roman perspective to
show what his life would really have been like.
As a specimen of biography in the passé présomptif,
Brunaux’s Vercingétorix is as good as they come. His narrative of the
great revolt of 52 BC is swift and exciting, and he does full justice to
Caesar’s terrible sieges at Avaricum, Gergovia and Alesia, though the
absence of a map does make the campaign unnecessarily hard to follow.
But for all its thunderous cadences, Vercingétorix is a deeply problematic
book. When its protagonist surrenders to Caesar at Alesia, Cassius Dio
claims (probably spuriously) that the defeated chief hoped to be
pardoned, “since he had once been on friendly terms with Caesar”. On
the basis of this phrase alone, Brunaux includes no fewer than twenty-
four pages on the years Vercingetorix “must have spent” as a hostage in
Caesar’s camp between 58 and 56 BC. It gets worse: Brunaux
reconstructs a year-by-year chronology of their friendship Caesar was
first attracted to Vercingetorix in 58 BC, but their “deep and intimate”
friendship only began in 57 BC, and so on. We are in the same territory
as Rosemary Sutcliffe’s Eagle of the Ninth or Robert Graves’s I,
Claudius.
This kind of thing can be done well. In 2005, Richard Hingley and
Christina Unwin wrote a first-rate biography of Boudicca (Boudica: Iron
Age warrior queen), about whom we know even less than we do about
Vercingetorix. Hingley and Unwin offer not a single example of
the passé présomptif: they include one short chapter summarizing what
we actually know about Boudicca, two chapters on the material culture
of Boudicca’s Britain, and five rich and absorbing chapters on her
afterlives in the British imagination, from the Elizabethan period to the
present. A book of this kind about Vercingetorix, showing how he has
been used and abused by everyone from Napoleon III to Le Pen, would
be a terrific thing to have. But Brunaux’s Vercingétorix, I fear, is not that
book.